Oath of the Horatii, The

Painting by the French artist Jacques-Louis David 1784 (Louvre, Paris). It depicts a story from ancient Rome: three heroic Roman brothers (the Horatii) pledge to win victory against the people of Alba by a fight to the death with three of the Alban family of Curiatii. The painting established a new kind of classicism, hard and sculptural, in contrast with the melting softness of 18th-century French art.

Presenting a stern republican virtue in opposition to the frivolous myths of artists like François Boucher, it was a revolutionary picture with a political as well as an aesthetic message, even though it was a royal commission painted four years before the French Revolution broke out.